Chapter 4. Getting Started Building the Game
Knowing how to navigate Unity’s interface is one thing. Creating an entire game with it is another. In this section of the book, you’ll take what you’ve learned in Part I, and use it to create a 2D game. By the end of this part, you’ll have Gnome’s Well That Ends Well, a side-scrolling action game (see Figure 4-1 for a sneak peek at what the game looks like).
Figure 4-1. The finished product
Game Design
The gameplay of Gnome’s Well is straightforward. The player controls a garden gnome, who’s being lowered by an attached rope into a well. At the bottom of the well there’s some treasure. The catch is that the well is filled with traps that kill the gnome if he touches them.
To begin with, we created a very rough sketch showing how the game would look. We used OmniGraffle, an excellent diagramming application, but the choice of tool doesn’t especially matter—pen and paper is just as easy, and can often be better. The goal is to get a very rough sense of how the game will be put together, as quickly as possible. You can see our Gnome’s Well sketch in Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2. The rough concept sketch for the game
Once we decided on what the game was going to be, we started deciding the overall architecture. We started by working out what ...